Task chairs are familiar items of furniture commonly used in an office or other occupational environment by persons while working in a seated position. Traditionally, producing a task chair suitable for a broad spectrum of individuals is a difficult endeavor. A primary reason for this difficulty encountered by task chair manufacturers is that users of task chairs vary greatly in their body shape, relative physical size and proportions.
To enhance comfort, manufacturers create task chairs characterized by a high degree of adjustability so that the task chair can be conformed to the body shape, physical size, and proportions of a seated chair user. Most task chairs incorporate manual adjustment features that allow the seated chair user to adjust the shape or movement characteristics of the chair components to a desired configuration. In particular, most task chairs have support arms with rests or pads upon which a person seated in the chair may support or prop their forearms. Seated chair users may need to adjust the position of the pads to customize them after initial assembly of the task chair.
The support arms are adjustable with at least one degree of freedom, such as a vertical height adjustment, for altering the position of the rests relative to the chair seat. In addition, the width between the arm pads may be adjusted by changing the relative position of the two support arms. Traditionally, separate adjustment knobs located on each arm have controlled these two basic movements. As a result, four individual adjustment knobs are required.
Adjustment knobs are prone to snagging power cables and/or vacuum lines attached to medical equipment in use by a user seated in the task chair, which may damage the equipment, the cables and/or the lines or may simply result in an unintentional disconnection. In addition, power cables and vacuum lines may wind about the adjustment knobs during use so that the length is effectively reduced. The likelihood for a seated user to experience such difficulties increases with an increase in the number of adjustment knobs.
What is needed, therefore, is a task chair that addresses these and other deficiencies of conventional task chairs.